


What's in a Name

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Brain Damage, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, RvB Angst War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 12:44:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6520246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wash doesn't spend most of his time thinking about how screwed up he is, so it can catch him by surprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's in a Name

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was: Wash or Carolina dealing with the aftermath of their AI-related brain damage years later.

They’re passing a bottle of the second-worst tequila Wash has ever had the misfortune to experience, and playing some kind of weird Red and Blue question game whose rules, so far as Wash can tell, are to prove who’s the biggest armored asshole present by asking the most invasive personal questions possible.

It’s not really their fault. Bad tequila does this to people.

Simmons accepts the bottle, sips daintily like maybe it won’t be so bad if he just avoids angering the tequila, and asks, “What’s your real name?”

It takes Wash a moment to realize that one is aimed at him because one: he wouldn’t have guessed Simmons had the balls and two: he’d thought the Freelancers were off limits for this game on account of being either too easy or too dangerous, depending on your perspective.

Then it occurs to him that he doesn’t actually know the answer.

“It’s Wash,” he says anyway, eventually. He’s just trying to keep things from getting awkward, but his answer comes on the heels of the kind of silence you usually hear at funerals or weddings. 

“Shit,” Tucker sighs, in a resigned tone that says they all recognized Wash’s freeze for the flashing neon “Welcome to fucked up Freelancer headspace” sign that it was.

The Freelancers go back to being off limits. There are some things it’s just better not to know about people.

 

It’s been a few days since then, and Wash _isn’t_ sulking, no matter what Tucker calls it. He’s _thinking._ It’s just that…he doesn’t know when it started. But how can he not know when this started?

Once upon a time, there was this kid named David. He was the only boy in a house full of women. When he was really little, he used to have his hair petted by his mother while she hummed millennia-old Earth songs under her breath. His first crush was a girl named Kim, followed immediately by a boy named Imari. He was hell on wheels with a gun in his hands, and if you look him up in a UNSC database, you can read about how he died after his court martial, when the prison transport heading to Earth was attacked by the Covenant. Just as well, really. He was going to be in for 40 years.

But what did his mother look like? She didn’t have green eyes. PFC Everett had smelled like fake lemon and boot polish, and as David had raised his gun to their staff sergeant, he’d twitched his fingers, fantasizing about pulling the trigger himself. That moment hovers in Wash’s mind in crystal clarity, but he’s sure Everett’s voice had not sounded anything like York. Considering how closely it’s bound to months of humiliation, he would’ve sworn he’d remember the swampy mildew-and-sweaty socks smell of the boy’s locker room in 6th grade for the rest of his life, but in every one of those memories now, it’s machine oil, adult sweat, blood and ionized recycled air.

One night he lies down on his back and watches the stars wheel slowly overhead while he tries to recall verbatim the conversation with the guidance counselor that led to him enlisting. On the screen of his memory, the counselor solicitously suggests that as well as he’s done in school, he’d be best off not being too ambitious in choosing a career. “There’s your disciplinary record, and what your family can afford…”

He _remembers_ the choking rage in his throat, intellectually; the swallowing-hot-coals sense of being trapped in a life that would eventually kill him. He remembers hating that man and everyone like him who were the reason a kid like him could never be successful enough to be free of them.

But he only feels it in a kind of impersonal, one-step-removed pity. It’s like a kid named David told him the story of that time a self-righteous asshole painted a picture for him of how no one would give a kid like him a shot at something better than dying trying to kill aliens in space.

He _feels_ that crushing rage for a different self-righteous asshole, staring down at him through a fisheye lens and telling him, in a condescending prick voice that doesn’t even try to mask the lie, “It’s not your fault, Alpha.”


End file.
